American Literature / Unit 14 AML 1338 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
Telling One Modernist From Another
The idea
Five voices dominate the period and five tests separate them. Eliot: fragments, allusion, a speaker who cannot act, cities, and a dry ironic register. Frost: regular meter, rhyme, New England objects, a speaking neighbour, and a darkness under an even surface. Stevens: abstraction, gaudy vocabulary, tropical or invented names, and the word imagination somewhere near. Williams: very short lines, plain American words, one concrete object held up, no classical reference at all. Moore: syllabic stanzas of odd shapes, animals described with precision, and quotation marks around borrowed prose. Pound sits behind the whole period as editor and provocateur, and his own signature is extreme compression or extreme accumulation with nothing in between.
In practice
Fragment, meter, abstraction, object, syllabic.
Where people slip
Frost is the trap, since a regular rhymed poem in a rural setting looks pre-modern. Frost is a contemporary of Eliot writing against the same century in the opposite direction.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
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